THE FIFTH DOWN; Colorful Language Has Ryan Red-Faced

By GREG BISHOP

Published: August 13, 2010

Shortly after HBO's ''Hard Knocks'' was broadcast on Wednesday night, the star of the show, Jets Coach Rex Ryan, called his mother. The episode opened with a parade of profanity by Ryan, and he knew he was in trouble.

Doris Ryan watched the first installment of the series at her home in Ardmore, Okla. She liked it. Well, most of it anyway.

She described the first five minutes as ''excruciating'' in a telephone interview Thursday. ''That wasn't Rex,'' she said. ''I don't know who that was, but that wasn't my son.''

By unofficial count, Ryan swore 20 times in the one-hour episode, repeating his favorite four-letter words. It was a symphony of bleep this, bleep that, and bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, too. HBO said that 870,000 people watched the episode, an increase of 37 percent over last season, when the series featured the Cincinnati Bengals.

Doris Ryan said she did not believe the first night of the series would be the lasting impression of her son, as much a sailor as a football coach, and she did not think he would repeat what she called a ''barrage of profanity.''To be clear: it's not that she believes her son never swears, or that he always speaks proper English, with impeccable grammar. She knows her son can be salty, uncensored, colorful. So are most in his profession, but few reach Ryan's level. And this seemed over the top, to her and her ex-husband, Buddy Ryan, who called and asked, ''What was that about?''

''Neither one of us had any idea,'' said Doris Ryan, a former university vice president who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. ''I'm willing to wager it's not going to happen again. He doesn't talk like that on a normal basis.''

Earlier Thursday morning, she had gone online to read reviews of the first episode. One quoted Rex Ryan with the profanities bleeped out.

Doris Ryan guessed that her son ''was nervous, which doesn't happen often,'' in front of all those cameras. She ventured that perhaps he acted out accordingly.

Ryan even addressed the issue in his news conference Thursday, where he first relayed that his mother had been upset.

''The problem is that's what happens,'' Ryan told reporters. ''Sometimes, you get rolling and words come out, and you don't even realize you're saying it. I'm going to be myself. Sometimes, you get rolling. I don't know why. I apologize if I offended more people than I usually offend.''

After the initial shock subsided, Doris Ryan said the show presented an accurate portrayal of her son. Like when he called his wife after the Jets gave him a contract extension and addressed her lovingly as ''babe.'' Or when he teased the defensive assistant coach Jeff Weeks, a longtime friend, about his tanning spray.

Doris Ryan's greatest pride came from seeing that pounds had melted from her son's midsection. Ryan had off-season weight-loss surgery, but when he took his family on a recent cruise, his mother worried that he would gain back some of that weight. Instead, his wife told his mother that they walked two miles each day around the ship, and he ended up losing seven pounds.

''He looked really good to me,'' Doris Ryan said. ''I could tell he lost a lot of weight. I'm really proud of him.''Four episodes remain in the series, plenty of time for Ryan to swear up another storm. But Doris Ryan laughed when asked if she had given her son advice.

''Oh, no,'' she said. ''I hope we've seen the last of that. It was a very brief conversation. But I don't expect we'll see that again.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTO: Rex Ryan swore so often in the debut of the HBO series ''Hard Knocks'' that his mother called watching it ''excruciating.'' (PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVIN RIVOLI/ASSOCIATED PRESS) (B9); Jets Coach Rex Ryan, with the Hall of Famer Joe Namath, swore so much in an episode of HBO's ''Hard Knocks'' that his mother said she did not recognize him. (PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ELLIS/THE CORTLAND STANDARD) (B11)